Does Website Load Speed Matter?

As a website owner, you want more engaged visitors, more conversions, and more revenue from your online investment. And optimizing your website performance is a big part of making that happen.

Does speed really matter? It’s just a few seconds, right?

Truth is, everyone these days is impatient. We hate to wait for anything. If something takes too long, we’re out of there fast, maybe never to return. Waiting creates a poor experience, and repeated poor experiences are not tolerated. With each passing second, more and more visitors abandon your website. You could loose a customer for life.

On the flip side, each second you reduce a page’s load time results in a better user experience, increased satisfaction, confidence and trust in your website. If more people stay on your site, more will see what you offer, leading to higher conversion rates and more success for you! Fast loading websites increase visitor retention, and could have a positive effect on your website traffic. Website speed is a minor ranking factor for Google since 2010. Faster sites do rank higher than slower sites.

And research confirms this.

97% of e-commerce website leaders surveyed by Yottaa agree that fast page loads result in higher conversions. 71% of these retailers said they would see an average of $58 million annual revenue increase by optimizing their website performance.

According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, down from 4 seconds in 2006.

According to Wired, after three seconds up to 40% of visitors will abandon your site. 54% are likely to tell their friends about a bad time on a slow website.

79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site again.

FastCompany reports 3 billion dollars is lost annually because of shopping cart abandonment on slow websites.

Google says they lose 20% of their traffic for each additional 100 milliseconds.

Amazon increased revenue by 1% for every 100ms of improvement (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).

People will visit a website less often if it’s slower than a competitor by a mere 250 milliseconds.

A 2015 Google survey asked “what do you dislike the most when browsing the web on your mobile device?” 570 people responded:

Waiting for slow pages to load: 46%

Being shown interstitials: 16%

Encountering unplayable videos: 14%

Getting redirected to the homepage: 13%

Other: 11%

What’s that!? Almost half of the respondents said slow loading pages is the most frustrating thing? Yeah, performance really does matter.

Internet users demand a fast and reliable online experience, especially those with slow internet connections and mobile devices. And the percentage of internet use on mobile devices like phones and tablets is increasing, climbing to over 50% of all visits early in 2015 and growing rapidly.